


smoke gets in your eyes

by Polexia_Aphrodite



Series: smoke gets in your eyes [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Complicated Relationships, Emotional Infidelity, Established Relationship, F/M, Past Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Past Relationship(s), Peggy and Howard run SHIELD, Peggy isn't perfect, SHIELD Director Peggy Carter, Subtext, neither is Howard, poor Maria Stark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-11
Updated: 2013-10-11
Packaged: 2017-12-29 03:06:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1000137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polexia_Aphrodite/pseuds/Polexia_Aphrodite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s the kind of anniversary that no one ever forgets, no matter how much they might want to. It’s been just over ten years to the day since Peggy last heard his voice, since she last saw him. <i>Steve</i>. </p><p>**</p><p>An after-work interlude between Howard Stark and Peggy Carter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	smoke gets in your eyes

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a little something, as always. I hope you all like it.

**1958  
** **SHIELD Headquarters**  
 **New York City**

Half-past-five in the evening has become Peggy Carter’s favorite time of day. By then, the bustle of SHIELD headquarters has died down, and most of the agents have made their way out – to happy hours or empty apartments or to the waiting arms of wives.

On this, particular day, the emptiness is a welcome relief. It’s the kind of anniversary that no one ever forgets, no matter how much they might want to. It’s been just over ten years to the day since Peggy last heard his voice, since she last saw him. _Steve_. 

She takes ahold of her purse, drapes her wool coat over her arm and heads for Howard’s office. He only uses this space sporadically, usually preferring his office at Stark Industries. His presence here today is no coincidence. From years of working together, she knows that he understands how heavy this day sits. He knows what it was like to lose him.

Peggy takes her time crossing the office floor to his door, looking over the agents’ desks as she passes them. Neatness, she tells them, is imperative, and she makes mental notes as to which agents will be on the receiving end of a lecture tomorrow.

When she pushes open the door to Howard’s office, he looks up from his desk as she enters. The years have changed her – her hair is longer, her joints are stiffer, she works harder to keep her figure the way it was when Steve knew her – but Howard never changes. His dark eyes flash with the same ingenious mischief, his clothes are still impeccably cut and tailored, and he still looks at her like she’s the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen. 

“How was your day, darling?”

She purses her lips at him. “I haven’t been your _darling_ for ages.”

Howard grins and stands, crossing the room towards her. Without a word, he takes the purse and coat out of her arms and hangs them on a rack by the door. He moves to his bar cart and pours bourbon into a pair of lowball glasses. 

“You’ll always be my darling, darling,” he tells her.

Peggy rolls her eyes and perches on the edge of his white marble-topped desk. His furniture – filled with curving space-age lines designed by Saarinen and Eames – makes her office, with its heavy wooden pieces, look downright old fashioned. But, however much their tastes may differ, Peggy loves his office, because it’s just like _him_ – daring and modern and forward-thinking.

“Well? How’s tricks?” he asks again as he sets a glass in her hand. Peggy swirls the amber liquid, feeling the weight of the glass in her palm.

“Busy.”

“Hm,” Howard nods and takes a sip from his glass, “Can’t say I didn’t notice you bustling back and forth all day.” He gestures towards the window that separates his office from the main floor, now shuttered by a white fabric blind.

He leans against the desk next to her and pulls a pack of Lucky Strikes out of his pocket. He lights two cigarettes in his mouth and passes one to Peggy. She frowns. He knows she’s trying to quit.

“Come on,” he bumps her shoulder with his, “Damn that Reader’s Digest article to hell. You need one of these today; I can see it in your face.”

Against her better judgment, she takes it between her middle and pointer fingers and sets it between her lips. He’s right, of course; he always is. She breathes hot smoke in and out and feels herself relax, feels something ease up off of her.

Howard inhales from his own cigarette, and blows a puff of smoke into the middle of the room. 

“We ought to go somewhere, you and me. Back into the field, just like the old days. Why should we let these whippersnappers have all the fun?” He swings his arm towards his shuttered window, towards the main floor and its rows of agents’ desks. Peggy turns to face him, and he winks at her shamelessly. “We could go back to Istanbul. Istanbul was fun.” 

It was ’52 when they were last in Istanbul. An unseasonable rainstorm and a host of gun-toting art smugglers had forced them to hide out in their hotel room. They’d made love until dawn, until they were sweat-slicked, boneless and breathless, too tangled up in each other to move or think or speak. 

However many years pass, Peggy still remembers that night clearly: the persistent drum of rain on their window, running her hands along the curve of muscle in Howard’s back as he covered her body with his, the things he’d said to her – things she’ll be happy never to forget. Things she still carries with her.

He’s learned that the mere mention of that trip can make her blush.

“ _Istanbul_ ,” she rolls her eyes and scoffs, tilting her face away from him, just in case her cheeks are turning pinker than she’d like. “Honestly, Howard, to hear you talk about it, you’d think no one had ever made love to you before or since.”

He raises an eyebrow at her, “I don’t know that anyone _has_.”

Peggy feels him lean into her. Just above the white silk collar of her blouse, his lips brush the side of her neck; his hand is warm on the small of her back. The feel of him so close to her, the scent of his aftershave and the brush of his hair against her cheek, makes her blood heat up. She sighs. 

She wonders if this is what he’s like with his mistresses, too. 

“How’s Maria?” Peggy asks, in her most censorious tone, and he pulls back to a respectable distance. “Has she cut her first tooth yet?”

“Don’t be petty, Peg. It doesn’t look good on you,” he smiles at her, “Everything else does, though”

His marriage shifted things. In the decade that they’d worked together after the war, dreaming and creating and transforming SHIELD side-by-side, he’d asked her to marry him a dozen times, and she’d always turned him down. She hadn’t really known why, but there had seemed to be a sort of ascetic dignity in staying unmarried. And perhaps she had known that what they’d already shared as partners and lovers and friends could never be improved upon by marriage. 

It would have been foolish to be surprised that, after she had rejected him enough times, he’d finally swept up the first debutante who had crossed his path. 

“She’s all right, though. You’d like her, if you ever gave her a chance.” Peggy shrugs and puffs on her cigarette. Howard looks at his hands. “The baby—It didn’t work out.”

Peggy looks up sharply. It was only a few weeks ago that he had told her Maria was expecting. She had wondered why he had told her privately, why he hadn’t announced it publicly, and she wonders now if his hopes had been slim all along.

“I’m so sorry to hear it.”

He shrugs his shoulders and throws up his hands, but he won’t look at her. She knows he knows she’d see right through him – that she’d see the grief and helplessness left behind by the loss of something that was barely more than an idea.

They smoke and sip their drinks together in silence for a while. When Howard speaks again, his voice is ragged and quiet. 

“I’ll be an old man before—“ he stops himself, shakes his head and clears his throat. When he looks back up at her, every trace of sadness is gone, replaced by bright eyes and a false smirk.

There’s a type of honesty to Howard that she appreciates, but too often he lets himself fall behind this sunny mask. He plucks what's left of her cigarette out of her fingers, turns and stamps his and hers out in the ashtray on his desk.

“It’s late,” he says, “Let me take you home.”

Peggy purses her lips. Whatever comfort he needs tonight, whatever relief _she_ needs, they can’t find it with each other anymore.

“I’m going back to Brooklyn _alone_. And you’re going back to Mrs. Stark. But first,” her voice goes soft, “tell me what you always tell me today.”

Howard moves to stand in front of her, brings his hands up to the side of her face, then to her shoulders. Peggy’s hands rise to his chest; her palms rest flat on the lapels of his jacket. What he says – the thing that he always tells her on this anniversary – he tells her plainly. He knows her, knows what she needs to hear.

“It all happened. It was real. He was a good man, and he loved you. And I’m going to find him for you.”

Peggy nods, but she can’t meet his eyes. Not now. She focuses her gaze on his pocket square – a glimpse of dark red against a field of grey wool. Tears sting the backs of her eyes. She’s cried all she can for Steve, and every year the sharp pain of that loss lessens. This is different. This is for _them_. For all the things they’re forbidden from sharing, now.

“Do you really think you will? Find him?”

“If it takes the rest of my life, and then some.”

She tries to clear her throat, to chase the sadness out of her voice, but it doesn’t work. 

“I suppose it would be nice to…to have a grave.”

Howard just nods. There’s a sort of _absence_ in him when it comes to Steve that she relates to. 

“I know, darling,” he tells her, and this time, she doesn’t cringe at the endearment.

His lips touch her right temple, and her eyes slide shut. She doesn’t even _try_ to push away the rush of affection that surges through her. 

“Let me take you home,” he repeats. 

She shakes her head, because Brooklyn is too far for him to take her, and because she knows that if she lets him do this, she’ll let him into her apartment, let him undress her and take her to bed. There’s a danger in needing him too much, now that he’s married. But as much as she doesn’t want to be _that_ kind of woman – the kind that preys on married men – when she’s with him, she feels like she’s lost _less_. She wonders if that’s how it feels for him, too.

He brings a hand up the side of her face, sliding the pad of his thumb across her cheekbone. 

“It’ll always be you, Peg.”

Peggy lets loose a long breath. It shouldn’t, it _really_ shouldn’t, but _oh_ it does something to her to hear him say that. And as much as she _really_ shouldn’t, she turns her face up to his. He’s so close already; she barely has to shift at all to bring her lips to the corner of his mouth. Howard brings a hand to the back of her neck; his palm is warm on her skin.

Peggy leans back. She won’t let herself linger.

“Come on,” she pats his chest with her hand. 

When he leaves her, when he moves towards the door, Peggy has to push down a wave of regret. But, she reminds herself, she knows who she is and what she isn’t, and she _isn’t_ anyone’s mistress – even Howard’s. Even if a part of her would be his in a heartbeat.

Howard picks up her coat and holds it out to her. She slides her arms through the sleeves and he adjusts it on her shoulders. “I’ll call you a cab.”

He puts on his own coat and hat, and extends a bent elbow to her. She hooks her hand through his arm and lets him lead her out.


End file.
